A SOTU challenge: Health reform

President Barack Obama will have two challenges when he talks about his signature health care law Tuesday night: Get the public back on his side, and don’t spend too much time on it.

It will be Obama’s first State of the Union address since he signed health care reform into law in March, and the public is still deeply divided over his biggest legislative accomplishment. Anything he says will be picked apart by groups on the left and the right – not to mention the entire health care industry – for clues about how strongly he’ll stand behind the law.

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Obama is likely to make the same arguments his administration has been making in recent days: The law has already been helping average Americans and small businesses, and repealing it would take important protections away from them.

But health care experts on the left and the right don’t expect him to spend a big portion of the speech on the topic, given that many voters thought he spent too much time trying to get the law through Congress rather than keeping his focus on the economy.

This time, Obama will talk about the benefits of the law and may make a case that it will help the economy in the long run, “but it will be brief,” said Neera Tanden, chief operating officer at the liberal Center for American Progress and a former top official at the Department of Health and Human Services during the health care debate.

Keeping the health care discussion short would set up a “nice contrast” with Republican efforts to repeal or withhold funding from the law, which could consume so much time on Capitol Hill that the Republicans themselves could face demands to spend more time on the economy, Tanden said.

“I don’t think it’s helpful to the cause of health care reform for the president to talk about it constantly,” she said.

Those who want to repeal the law, however, don’t think there is any danger that the public will think Republicans are spending too much time on it. “Now that Obamacare’s law, it’s absolutely essential” to repeal it to prevent its costs and mandates from harming the economy, said Alex Cortes, chairman of Defundit.org, one of the most vocal opposition groups. “If you’re going to talk about jobs, you’ve got to talk about Obamacare.”

While the White House has been quiet about the State of the Union’s health care details, it has been signaling that the speech will be about big themes rather than getting into the nuts and bolts of the health care law or anything else. Press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that the speech would not be “one where you spend big chunks of time walking through the specific machinations of policy.”

Still, the law’s supporters hope Obama will make a strong case for keeping the law and not offer too many concessions to the Republican-controlled House. “He needs to make clear that this is the law of the land. What’s best for people is to implement it,” said Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now. “The last thing we need is to redo the health care debate.”